The Month of Rains

April has come to mean many things to me. April is often when we head south during school vacation, taking time for this little family to regroup in a warmer and less hurried setting. Although this year Max is taking Drivers Ed courses during his week off from school. Driver's Ed for chrissakes!

Two years ago this month I wrote about Mary Gaitskill in The Startling Subterrane of Demons, and published eight other blog posts, including a little ditty about the la la la of anodyne, and a family trip to Niagara Falls (slowly we turned, step by step...).  Last year, in April, I wrote about losing my friend Sheila, and a family trip to D.C. It wasn't the best of months, yet there was still beauty, a lovely diffused  April glow, in its lengthened days. This April has not offered much time to blog, try as I may. And so...

Word of the day is splenetic. One meaning: melancholy (though obsolete).

April is rainy. Around this time, two years ago, I told you that Max loves a rainy day. But that the rains tend to hurl melancholy straight to my mind's warped door. The magnolia has not yet come around. (True. I just looked.) This time last year, I told you April hath thirty days. It hasn't changed.

(If I'm not mindful I could eat a whole 12.60 ounce bag of frozen m&ms in one sitting—in which case, I might become splenetic. In a different way.)

April is National Poetry Month.

(This could be The Blog of Links.)

This month, Lulu submitted her first poem for publication. She's been writing lots of poems. As she did last year and the year before that and the year before...

Here's one she wrote today:

Pages

Dribble dribble drop

There’s another thought

One, then two, then three

The emotions pour out of me

The page is filled with countless words

Ink the color of robin birds

No date or time

This is only mine

It was pouring yesterday when I picked her up from lacrosse practice. Rain and lightning and high winds, barrels and cardboard and all kinds of debris flying across the roads. She tossed her equipment in the trunk, jumped in the front seat and happy sing-songed, April showers bring May flowers!

Yes, indeed.

(I'll let you know when the magnolia comes around.)

The picture of her that tops this post was taken in an April of more than a few years back. Maybe six or seven. Or eight. I can't remember. But it was April all those years ago, and we were in Gettysburg. Lemme tell you, if the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C. doesn't get to you (I know: if you are human the VVMW got to you), Gettysburg will.

After a splenetic meltdown in April in Gettysburg of all those years ago, we bought Lu a wood stock, steel barrel, pink Lady Kentuckian musket. Her brother had gotten a toy rifle the day before (against my wishes) and, thanks to her father, there was no saying No to her.  We walked Pickett's Charge, where this photo was taken, and could feel the low drumming of that war. Melancholy. There were boys on that field. Boys.

Emily Dickinson was thirty-three years old on July 3, 1863, the day Pickett and his troops charged across the open field. Though miles away in Amherst, MA, Dickinson was deeply moved by the events  of the Civil War which made its way into her poetry, in poems like My Portion is Defeat—today.

But it is this beautiful Dickinson poem (that has nigh a drop of rain but water, water everywhere), the unabashed wildness of nature, a long, long way from Gettysburg, war, the wildness of man, that I'll share with you today:

Poem 23: In the Garden

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Happy April. Happy Spring. Read poetry! Write poems!

The Startling Subterrane of Demons

Source unknown

Ironically, the advanced fiction class I'm taking leaves little time for writing, but it affords big reading opportunities. Like Mary Gaitskill whose short, Tiny, Smiling Daddy, I read last week. Gaitskill's writing is not comfort food. It doesn't warm your palate. It's a cup of coffee laced with hot, hot, hot sauce (yes, I've tried this—unwittingly). It burns and curdles inside. And Gaitskill doesn't walk hand-in-hand with you through the park on one of those perfectly cloudless summer afternoons. Rather, she tends to push and poke you through a dark, sweaty, stalactite and stalagmite studded cave that appears to be closing in on you. Mighty spears threatening to impale and devour from head to toe.

But what is so terrifyingly good about Gaitskill's writing is that she gets to our demons—the base, primordial madness of neither good nor bad people—exposing demonic sensibilities and the way we live and/or cope with them (or the way we bury them in that Cimmerian cavern, or drown them in its murky pool). And she's master of matching simple plot with thorny theme and narrative.

This past February The New Yorker *uncharacteristically* published  her short story The Other Place. (Perhaps, a turning point for The New Yorker?) It is a haunting piece about a father's obsession with violence. Women and violence. Bad thoughts that dangle out there in the periphery. In that other place. And because this story begins perfectly normal (however that my be defined) and naturally, it is all the more jarring. Because she writes it from the father's point of view, makes it all the more real.

Gaitskill's story examines that other place inside us all. The darker place. It's a place I often try to write about in my fiction. While my writing here tends to be light and airy, my fiction takes on much darker themes. Maybe that's because I'm keenly aware of the light and dark sides, and the common wall they share. I think being a parent sort of nudges that. Or maybe it's that I feel I'd be less aware if I were not so responsible for the shaping of little ones.

Good and evil reside in all of us, but it's our conscience that holds the keys to the duplex's doors. Gaitskill explores more of that here. I can't seem to stop exploring it everywhere.